20 Companies And Products We Remember Fondly
20 Companies And Products We Remember FondlyThere's no question that GPU manufacturer 3dfx helped change the face of PC gaming, and indeed the entire gaming industry. It started with the Voodoo Graphics chip back in 1996, supplied in various arcade gaming machines during a time when arcades still showcased the latest and greatest technology (although consoles eventually killed them off).
But when EDO DRAM prices dropped by the end of the year, 3dfx went into the PC business and brought forth its now-classic Voodoo Graphics PCI card. At the same time, id Software released its latest FPS game, Quake, ditching the pixel-based graphics engine used with previous games, and turned to vector-based polygons to create a more compelling experience. Taking advantage of 3dfx's miniport OpenGL driver, the revamped Quake (GLQuake) suddenly took PC gaming into a new era of graphics, providing smooth surfaces, gorgeous textures and lighting, and screaming-fast frame rates.
In 1998 3dfx took the GPU industry a step further and introduced Scan-Line Interleave, the ability to install two Voodoo2 boards and use them together as one processing power house. However over the next few years, the company saw a shift in strategy and an overall decline, leading to a filing for bankruptcy in 2000 and Nvidia's subsequent acquisition.
This one's for you, Billy.
"A final version clocked in at 300 MHz, and was launched May 2008"
You haven't lived till you've sat through numerous installs of MS Office 4.3 which came on over 40 3.5" floppys.
"A final version clocked in at 300 MHz, and was launched May 2008"
You haven't lived till you've sat through numerous installs of MS Office 4.3 which came on over 40 3.5" floppys.
- although mounted on an AGP card, the Banshee processor still worked in PCI mode, not enjoying the memory access granted by AGP (but using the bandwidth); there was hardly a difference in performance between the PCI and AGP versions.
- Quake never used Glide; 3dfx wrote a miniport OpenGL driver for the Voodoo cards, and Quake used that.
- the OPL3 was an advanced frequency modulator chip with stereo capabilities, and was coupled with the digital sound processor (the Sound Blaster Pro came with an OPL2 chip, the Sound BLaster Pro 2 had an OPL3, but both had the same DSP; the Sound BLaster 16 also had an OPL3 chip).
oh, the wolfenstein screeny is very nostalgic! good 'ol days!
i still remember 1995 that my pentium 166mhz was $1.2k! now i'm stuck with a ~$500 rig.
Don't forget about VESA Local Bus and the early battle with Intel and PCI v1.0 (which was garbage then).
I also liked STB's cards before 3dfx bought them out. I loved my Powergraph Ergo with its S3 chip. But that was a long time ago and now I wouldn't use S3 chrome garbage in a print server.
A lot of motherboard chipset vendors used to compete on high-performance desktop boards but we're down to three now. When was the last time you saw a high-end MB with a Via or ALi chipset?
Same goes for a lot of motherboard vendors. I really liked my old AOpen board. They had a lot of nifty designs. Remember the one with the tube amplifier?
Some good system builders disappeared when margins shrunk down to nothing, like Northgate. Of course some we're better off without like Packard Bell.
- Direct3D support
- OpenGL support
Version 2.25 (experimental) for example had near perfect OpenGL support but it was cut back in 2.26, the last version of the patch), and Direct3D support matched Glide in 2.26 (it actually exceeded it, as it supported resolutions higher than 800x600 and 32-bit colours).
Before these patches, one had to use a Glide wrapper to run accelerated Unreal on a TnT card; when the Unreal patches came out (and the DirectX palette patch for Final Fantasy 7) , I removed the Diamond Monster3D card I had kept alongside my Asus v3400 TnT 16 Mb and never looked back.
I still have that v3400 TnT in a box, by the way: that baby, properly tweaked, patched, cooled and driven, was quite the powerhouse, in no small parts due to its (huge for the time) 16 Mb frame buffer and AGP 2x+Sideband Addressing support.
Great article thx.
I could waste hours and hours online talking to friends, but I didn't play games yet (MUL doesn't count...). The thought that a graphics card might need its own fan was absurd.